With the holiday carol “The 12 Days of Christmas” playing in my head, I’m excited to announce my upcoming “12 Days of Power BI Dashboards” blog series, where I will be sharing a new Power BI dashboard each day from December 12th – 23rd. The dashboards will be based on unique and yet common data…

As the Power BI Desktop team releases monthly updates, some new features are released as “Preview Features”. You can easily enable these features through the option menu (File -> Options & Settings -> Options -> Preview Features). Once you select the feature(s), you must restart Power BI Desktop for the changes to take effect. Click on…

Power BI Desktop gets updated each month, packed with new functionality. When you encounter an issue and request help through the forums or with a colleague, one of the first questions you will be asked is “What version of Power BI Desktop are you running?” You can easily answer this by clicking on File -> Options…

If you encounter a product bug when working with Power BI Desktop, leverage the “Send a Frown” capability to provide Microsoft with the bug details and receive direct feedback from the Power BI product team with information about your problem. This amazing feedback mechanism has now helped me identify and get fixed 10 different product…

Today’s blog entry comes from the investigative work of my outstanding SharePoint PFE colleague, Micah Wilkerson. In his customer environment, they had built a nice dashboard in Power BI Desktop, which was then sent via email to another team. When the team attempted to open the dashboard, they received the error message saying that the…

My Experience Completing the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science Earlier this year, Microsoft announced an interesting new educational track designed to help people grow skills in the area of data science. Originally titled “Microsoft Professional Degree”, they later updated the name to the current “Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science” to lower the…

In a recent forum post at www.powerbi.com, a user asked how to locate the 32-bit Power BI Desktop installation. The question has been asked a couple times, so I’ll outline the steps here for future assistance. Go to www.powerbi.com, highlight Products in the menu bar along the top, then select Power BI Desktop Click on…

Power BI – The Shape Map visual fails if a custom map contains non-Latin1 characters with the following error: Failed to execute ‘btoa’ on ‘Window’: The string to be encoded contains characters outside of the Latin1 range. After confirmation from the Power BI Desktop product team, this is a known limitation with the Shape Map…

Power BI – Comparing Date Selection Visuals – Slicer vs. Timeline With the recent October 2016 Power BI Desktop update, we now have a much nicer way to filter reports based on dates by using the built-in Slicer visual. I have been using the custom Timeline visual in most of my reports where date selection is required….

Loading a Power BI report fails with error “This implementation is not part of the Windows Platform FIPS validated cryptographic algorithms.” UPDATE (Nov. 1, 2016) – The Power BI Desktop product team has accepted and fixed the bug. The fix will be part of an upcoming Power BI Desktop release. UPDATE (Nov. 29, 2016) –…